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The local premiere of an award-winning documentary about the missing and murdered girls and women in the Highway of Tears case will be featured at the Vancouver International Women in Film Festival in March. Canadian producer/actor Matt Smiley and Vancouver-born actress Carly Pope created the 80-minute film to raise awareness about the lonely stretch of Highway 16 between Prince Rupert and Prince George, where many girls and women have disappeared or been murdered during the past 40 years.

On Aug. 26, 1854, Hudson’s Bay Company trader John F. Kennedy wrote a letter to his daughter Mary. It was addressed “Fort Simpson,” a fur trading post near today’s Prince Rupert. One hundred and sixty years later, it’s one of the oldest letters to survive from early British Columbia. And on Feb. 21, Brian Grant Duff of All Nations Coins and Stamps is putting it up for auction.

Each year, Dan Quinn rounds up a few snowboarding comedian buddies and heads out on the Snowed In Comedy Tour. The Vancouver-based comic, who is originally from Edmonton, had the idea to mix jokes and winter sports seven years ago.

VICTORIA — This country’s decision to play hardball in the dispute with the Alaska state ferry service would appear to have attracted the attention of our neighbour to the north — but perhaps not in the way that was intended. “Confrontational Canadian stance on dock project likely to backfire on B.C.,” was the way the Anchorage-based Alaska Dispatch News reported the latest development in the proposed multi-million-dollar makeover of the ferry terminal in Prince Rupert.

It is one thing to affect a high dudgeon over an affront to one’s dignity and another thing entirely to be so consumed with the need for redress that one is prepared to cut off one’s nose to spite one’s face.

VICTORIA — For all of Premier Christy Clark’s anger at the Alaskans for imposing buy-American rules on renovations to their ferry terminal in Prince Rupert, B.C. could lose more than it gains from this week’s turn in the dispute.

The Canadian government is threatening to block a U.S. construction project in British Columbia after the state of Alaska rejected Ottawa's demands that it ditch the project's Buy America restrictions.

Even though Canada’s economy is being buffeted by plummeting global oil prices, the outlook for B.C. in 2015 remains stable. The province’s economy is expected to grow by 2.7 per cent this year, an increase over estimated growth of 2.3 per cent in 2014, according to the Economic Forecast Council, a private-sector group comprised of 14 economists who provide a benchmark forecast to the B.C. government.

North Vancouver technology is being used to battle pirates and smugglers in the Malacca Strait and is about to be tested closer to home in the Georgia Strait. The local goal is to see how well Xanatos Marine’s monitoring and security systems might prevent environmental disasters such as tanker collisions.

As the year dawned amid plummeting oil prices and other discouraging news from the petroleum sector, there was no lack of speculation that B.C. had missed a window of opportunity on liquefied natural gas. Then there was the word from cabinet minister and deputy premier Rich Coleman.